Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (13 page)

One of the few hard-headed realists who felt otherwise, immediately after the passage of the Volstead Act, was ex-President William Howard Taft. Those who thought that “an era of clear thinking and clean living” was at hand were living in a fool’s paradise, he wrote. The law had been passed “... against the views and practices of a majority of people in many of the large cities. . . . The business of manufacturing alcohol, liquor and beer will go out of the hands of law-abiding members of the community and will be transferred to the quasi-criminal classes.”

The “bond of national union” would come under severe strain, and he warned against “variations in the enforcement of the law.” But even Taft scarcely foresaw the extent of the damage Prohibition would inflict on the American body politic.

To become effective, the Eighteenth Amendment required ratification by a two-thirds majority of states. The result was a foregone conclusion. Many of them were already wholly or partially dry, and Prohibition was clearly a vote-winning issue. For all that, the ASL propaganda machine moved into high gear, and a spate of songs, based on popular tunes such as “Annie Laurie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” were sung in churches and Sunday schools all over America.
¹
Mississippi became the first to vote for the measure. A year later, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth — and last — state whose voice was needed to make it part of the Constitution. The act prescribed a year’s grace between final ratification and implementation. Twelve months later, on January 17, 1920, at the stroke of midnight, the whole of America officially went dry.

Along with the war, Prohibition had been the most talked-about issue in American homes and editorial columns. Since 1917, the debate had been so acrimonious that everyone knew what to expect. In the months leading up to January of 1920, some distillers moved large quantities of liquor abroad — the Bahamas becoming a huge storage area, which would make it, after 1920, a bootlegger’s paradise. Other, less far-seeing distillers had accumulated huge stocks, for sale while purchases were still legal. But these were not as lucrative as they had expected, for prices had risen steeply, and they decided to advertise. Posters bearing the effigy of Uncle Sam appeared all over America, urging consumers to “Buy now. Uncle Sam will
ENFORCE
prohibition!”

Most distillers believed Prohibition would prove so unpopular and unworkable it would quickly be repealed. Hardest hit were private investors in distilleries, who held “whiskey certificates,” shares measured in multigallon cases (not much different from today’s coffee futures). There had been some talk of compensation, the government buying up all certificates, for eventual legal use. This was quickly dropped. By 1920, the value of whiskey certificates had plummeted to nearly nothing, their holders almost as penalized as investors holding Russian loan bonds. Failure to compensate the whiskey investors would have huge repercussions.

In the final few weeks before January 17, 1920, Americans did stock up, to the limit of their financial restrictions. Those who could afford it rented space for storage in warehouses and even in safe deposit boxes. But on January 15, 1920, two days before the act came into force, New York judge John C. Knox decreed that all liquor stocks outside the home broke the law and were liable to seizure. All across America, there was a huge panic as millions of Americans carted their liquor stocks back to their homes. The New York
Evening Post
reported a rush to “hire trucks or baby carriages or anything else on wheels.” “Fair ladies sat in limousines behind alluring barricades of cases,” wrote a San Francisco
Chronicle
reporter.

Surprisingly, though a phenomenal amount of drinking took place all over America on the night of January 16, the occasion failed to live up to reporters’ (and saloon keepers’) expectations. Whiskey had become expensive (only in one bar, the Della Robbia Room in the Hotel Vanderbilt, was it given away free), revelry was muted, and there were no great crowds on the Manhattan streets, perhaps because it was a bitterly cold night. Although mock wakes were a favorite theme (in Healey’s restaurant customers were given small wooden coffins as mementos), the New York
Tribune
reported “sad scenes” on Broadway, and the
Evening Post
noted that “the big farewell failed to materialize.” In somewhat hyphenated prose, the
New York Times
wrote that “the spontaneous orgies of drink that were predicted failed in large part to occur on schedule. . . . Instead of passing from us in violent paroxysms, the rum demon lay down to a painless, peaceful, though lamented, by some, death.” A walk through Broadway at midnight, a
Sun
reporter observed, “revealed an almost empty thoroughfare.”

There were a few exceptions: a wealthy client took over the Park Avenue Hotel for a large private party. Black cloth draped the walls; tables were covered with black crepe; waiters, musicians, and guests were dressed uniformly in black; black caviar was served; and drink came in black glasses specially ordered for the occasion. In the center of the dining room, in the place of honor, stood a black coffin filled with black bottles. The orchestra played funeral dirges, and at midnight the guests filed past the coffin as though mourning a dead person. “Lights were extinguished, and the orchestra played a few bars of dirge. Then a spotlight picked up the final spectacle — two young men and two girls, all in black, sitting at a black table and pouring the last drops from four black bottles, while they held their pocket handkerchiefs before their streaming eyes. A newspaperman who wandered into this party for a few minutes reported that it was ‘the damndest thing I ever saw.’ “
²
In Cincinnati, more decorously, a melancholy beerfest took place under the auspices of the old German-American Alliance, now renamed the Citizens’ League.

In contrast, the following day, the Prohibitionists’ self-congratulatory celebrations were awesome, their oratorical hyperbole more extravagant than ever. “They are dead, that sought the child’s life,” thundered the inevitable William Jennings Bryan at a huge rally in Washington attended by hundreds of Congressmen, the entire ASL establishment, and thousands of well-wishers. “They are dead! They are dead! King Alcohol has slain more children than Herod ever did. The revolution that rocked the foundation of the Republic will be felt all over the earth. As we grow better and stronger through the good influence of Prohibition, we will be in a position to give greater aid to the world.”

In Norfolk, Virginia, Billy Sunday, the most famous evangelist of his day and a lifelong campaigner since his “conversion” (in earlier days he had been a noted song writer, baseball player, and an even more noted drunk), staged a mock funeral service for John Barleycorn. With his usual showmanship, he had a troupe of mimes, impersonating drunkards and devils, accompany the 20-foot-long coffin to its final resting place. “The reign of tears is over,” he told a huge crowd. “The slums will soon only be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn-cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children
will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” Ominously, in Chicago, within an hour of the Volstead Act taking effect, six armed, masked men made away with whiskey earmarked for “medicinal use,” worth $100,000.

The delay between the passing of the act and its implementation was no humane measure that let Americans enjoy one last year of legal drinking. The intervening year had been spent setting up some of the new law enforcement machinery, for which Congress had earmarked a meager $3 million. Some 1,500 agents of the new Prohibition Unit (soon to be called the Prohibition Bureau) were recruited, and the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Internal Revenue Service trained in their new duties.

The decision to put the Prohibition Bureau under the authority of the Treasury Department — instead of the Justice Department — was Wheeler’s idea, and he had personally lobbied (then) Senator Warren Harding, soon to succeed Wilson as president, to that effect. Very early on, it proved to be a disastrous decision, but not nearly as disastrous as the other decision, made concurrently, to exclude the new Prohibition agents from the Civil Service and to exempt them from its rules. In every state, their recruitment was political, an integral part of the spoils system, in the hands of local politicians whose careers depended on patronage. All that was required on the part of an aspiring Prohibition agent was the endorsement of the ASL, a congressman, or other prominent local politician. No other qualifications or character references were needed; some of the new recruits even had criminal records. The job paid a maximum salary of $2,300 a year, barely enough to live on — almost inviting corruption. The ASL later justified this decision on the grounds that had it insisted on Civil Service status for the new recruits, “to have forced the issue would have been to jeopardize the passage of the bill.” But in a reply to the ASL, a National Civil Service Reform League spokesman wrote that “the plain fact is that the congressmen wanted the plunder and you let them have it.” In the first few months of Prohibition, the agents were mostly Democratic appointees. When the Harding administration took over, almost all were dismissed and replaced by Republicans. The turnover was huge: in any one year, there were 10,000 applicants for 2,000 jobs, and the average length of service was only a few months — most agents being “let
go” for corrupt practices that could not be satisfactorily proved or prosecuted.

Although Prohibition had been in the cards for several years, many Americans simply did not know what to expect. Whereas Colonel Daniel Porter, a New York supervising revenue agent, announced that he was confident “there will not be any violations to speak of,” New Jersey Governor Edward I. Edwards said he hoped to keep New Jersey “as wet as the Atlantic ocean.” In truth, the Volstead Act was flagrantly broken from the moment it became law, and continued to be flouted for the next thirteen years.

The nation’s legislators and law enforcers professed to be completely taken aback, after 1920, by the extent of Prohibition-related lawbreaking — and the concomitant, almost immediate proliferation of speakeasies, bootleggers, rumrunners, moonshiners, and hijackers, all bringing violence in their wake. They need not have been so surprised. Had they bothered to look at those towns and states where Prohibition had already become law
before
1920, they would have realized what was in store. In 1916, for instance, Prohibition had finally become a reality in Washington State, and immediately the new law there (very similar in content to the Volstead Act) had been totally ignored or subverted. A month after Spokane, then a town of 44,000 registered voters, became dry, 34,000 liquor permits had been issued, and soft-drink shops selling under-the-counter liquor were doing a roaring trade, with sixty-five brand-new drugstores — all selling liquor — competing for business. Moonshine liquor was freely available, there was a constant stream of smuggled liquor from across the nearby Canadian border, and a drugstore-owning couple whose establishment was, Carry Nation style, “hatchetized” by Prohibition vigilantes, promptly went into another line of business, running a company shipping rum from Cuba to Canada, but in fact smuggling it back into the twenty-eight dry states.

What had happened in Spokane four years before national Prohibition became law was to become the norm all over America. “A staggering increase in liquor prescribed as medicine occurred during the first five months throughout the country.”
³
In Chicago alone, as soon as the Volstead Act became law, over 15,000 doctors and 57,000 retail druggists applied for licenses to sell “medicinal” liquor, and in the next three years there would be 7,000 (mostly new) “soft-drinking”
parlors, actually dispensing liquor. Scores of clandestine breweries also set up shop, and small fortunes were made by printers supplying fake whiskey labels, carpenters making fake wooden crates for brand-name whiskey, and pharmacists selling ingredients for homemade stills (yeast, juniper oil, fusel oil, iodine, and caramel). Americans bought huge quantities of malt syrup, essential for turning “near-beer” into the real thing, and the Prohibition Bureau estimated that several hundred million gallons of homemade 2.5-degree beer were consumed every year. There was a run on anything containing alcohol that could be used as a basis for homemade liquor — embalming fluid, antifreeze solution, solidified and rubbing alcohol, bay rum — often with horrendous consequences, for, inexplicably, old rules requiring denatured alcohol to bear the
POISON
warning were discontinued.

The ingenuity of clandestine liquor manufacturers was considerable. In the Midwest, the liquid residue of silos was collected and turned into liquor. New brands sprang up: Panther Whiskey, Red Eye, Cherry Dynamite, Old Stingo, Old Horsey, Scat Whiskey, Happy Sally, Jump Steady, Soda Pop Moon, Sugar Moon, and Jackass Brandy, supposedly made of peaches. In the South, a brand called Squirrel Whiskey got its name because it was so strong it was supposed to make consumers climb trees. In the ghettos, a popular drink was known simply as nigger gin. “Sweet whiskey” was made with nitrous ether — alcohol mixed with nitric and sulfuric acid. Yack-yack Bourbon, a popular Chicago drink, was made with iodine and burnt sugar. From Mexico came “American” whiskey, made from potatoes and cactus, and from Jamaica a 90-proof alcohol concoction known as Jamaica ginger, or Jake.
Colliers
reported that victims of Jake paralysis lost control of their extremities: “... the victim has no control over the muscles that normally point the toes upward.”

Although some Californian vineyards were ruined by Prohibition, certain Napa Valley wine-making families became exceedingly wealthy. In fact, grape production, far from declining, increased tenfold between 1920 and 1933, the main reason being the manufacture of dried grape and “raisin cakes.” These were allowed, under a provision of the Volstead Act, to prevent farmers from going under entirely. The aim was, officially, to allow householders to make “nonintoxicating cider and fruit juices for home consumption to the extent of 200 gallons annually.”